The Rock leads an avalanche of stony cliches in visually slick 'San Andreas'

If you absolutely must watch a remarkable reworking of a classically bad 1970s disaster movie, you absolutely must watch "San Andreas."

Brad Peyton's technically slick, over-the-top homage to "Earthquake," "The Towering Inferno," "Airport," "Avalanche," "The Poseidon Adventure" and their lesser incarnations takes visual effects to new heights of realistically inventive mass destruction while retaining the worst elements of the genre: wafer-thin stock characters, formula plotting, sophomoric dialogue and the obligatory Tinkerbell resurrection scene.

Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson plays Ray Gaines, a rescue chief on the L.A. Fire Department assigned to helicopter duty. In the opening sequence, he proves himself a quiet man of action by rescuing a fellow firefighter and the blonde driver of a car that careens over a cliff, and dangles from a tree root.

"Just doin' mah job!" Ray says in John Waynean modesty.

He's really mad because his wife Emma (Carla Gugino) has served him with divorce papers so she can move in with Daniel, a wealthy architect played by Ioan Gruffudd. Ray's gorgeous, blue-eyed daughter Blake (Alexandra Daddario) asks Daniel why he never became a parent.

"I guess I never had kids because I was so busy raising these!" Daniel replies, holding up photos of big city high-rises.

Every disaster movie needs a nerdy know-it-all harbinger of doom who predicts awful things coming, but nobody takes him seriously.

Paul Giamatti supplies that role as the nutty professor Dr. Lawrence Hayes, author of the book "Tremors," who develops a method to predict earthquakes, even though he seems to only be able to predict them 1.5 nanoseconds before they actually hit.

When the big one strikes - and it's a doozy, measuring 9.5 on the Richter scale - the quake wipes out everything along the San Andreas fault that runs along the backbone of California.

Emma becomes trapped in an L.A. high-rise with a snooty friend on a shopping trip. Blake gets trapped in Daniel's limo in a San Francisco underground garage.

Ray becomes trapped in some of the cheesiest clichés ever to grace a disaster movie.

First, he must fly his helicopter to save Emma from the roof top of a collapsing downtown building. Then he and Emma must figure out where Blake might be and go save her, too.

After they crash in their helicopter, this might sound like a herculean task. Not for them. Ray and Emma have an easy time finding a truck, an airplane and a speed boat when they need them. After all, Johnson did play "Hercules,"

Meanwhile, Blake is rescued by two British brothers, devilishly handsome Ben (Aussie actor Hugo Johnston-Burt) and his unfiltered, prepubescent little brother Ollie (Irish actor Art Parkinson).

He gets one look at Blake and remarks to the camera, "I can't wait to be 20!"

It's a disappointment that Peyton, who previously directed Johnson's adventure "Journey 2: The Mysterious Island," didn't tighten up this overly long disaster and hold out for a smarter, more self-effacing screenplay from Harvard grad Carlton Cuse, Andre Fabrizio and Jeremy Passmore.

Most of their writing smacks of perfunctory boilerplate material, although the trio should be commended for verbal economy. They created an entire screenplay out of three basic sentences: "Ohmygod!" "We gotta get out of here!" "Let's go!"

The three botch an excellent opportunity for architect Daniel to be ironically killed by one of his own "children."

At least they realized that "San Andreas" is really far more than a disaster movie.

It's an old-fashioned romance about an estranged married couple who realize they were made for each other, despite their guilt over the earlier death of a second daughter.

"I should have let you in," Ray says in near tears. "I just didn't know!"

Nice to know that billions of dollars in property damage and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people took place in "San Andreas" just so Ray and Emma could avoid a no-fault divorce.

“San Andreas”

★ ★ ½

Starring: Dwayne Johnson, Carla Gugino, Paul Giamatti, Ioan Gruffudd, Alexandra Dadderio

Directed by: Brad Peyton

Other: A Warner Bros. release. Rated PG-13 for language and violence. 123 minutes